Smiley (Duplicate Keys, The Age of Grief, etc.) has produced a bulky, sometimes spectacular saga of 14th-century Greenland—a tapestry of hunger, revenge and the disintegration of social institutions. Since the tenth century, Norsemen had farmed and hunted from spring until fall, trying to amass enough food to survive the winters. Smiley's novel plops down at a crucial turning point: the Plague has hit Europe hard, and contact with the continent (as well as the all-important inflow of churchmen) is falling off. Meanwhile, Asgeir Gunnarsson is at odds with his strange neighbors at Ketils Stead. When Asgeir murders a woman he believes to be a witch, the bishop awards the use of his prime field to his hatred rivals. This bitterness trickles down to the next generation—to quiet Gunnar and his sister Margret, whose ancestral stead is eventually usurped by the politically adept Ketils Stead crowd. Winter starvation has always been common, but a vomiting ill and a string of bad hunts prompts widespread death. Amidst the marriages; births and grievances, the bishop dies. The priests are now a low-profile lot, except for former cowherd Larus, who's turning some heads with his apocalyptic visions. And Bjorn Bollason, the lawspeaker, is benevolent and popular at first, but he gets impressed by talky visitors from Iceland and allows them to burn wild Koll-grim, Gunnar's son, at the stake. The annual "Thing" melts down into a bloody melee, pirates plunder and kill, and the saddened Greenlanders bury their dead. Into this icy historical vacuum—the period between the end of outside contact and the eventual disappearance of the Greenland settlers—Smiley pours a thin-broth existence, flavored in spots by dramatic events and complicated emotional relationships. Particularly interesting: the portrayal of the spiritual life as a bleak—and without priests—unconvincing go-round of tithes and half-remembered prayers. Smiley's uninflated prose lulls at first, but gradually accumulates the incantory power of a strange winter-told tale. A bleak, stirring picture of the slow slouch towards the death of a civilization.
Pub Date: April 18, 1988
ISBN: 1400095468
Page Count: 807
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1988
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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